Jon
Ronson’sSo You’ve Been Publicly Shamedlooks
at people who have been dragged onto the social media stage and torn to pieces,
for perceived slights against humanity which really weren’t anything of the
sort.

Public
shaming isn’t a new thing, as the office sociopath in your life will readily
demonstrate, but its instant global effect thanks to Twitter and Facebook is
more potentially devastating than ever before. Seemingly innocuous things
posted without an ounce of malice can generate ripples which grow into tidal
waves in a matter of minutes, drowning careers and swamping whole lives.

“My
god, this could have been me,” is something you’ll say to yourself a lot in
reading this book.

Ronson
starts off with his own example of a time he publicly shamed people. One day,
he discovered a sockpuppet account had been set up on Twitter under his name.
It focused on the writer’s food snobbery and, it seems, a predilection for
“cock” – both of which came as something of a surprise to Ronson.
Understandably annoyed by the masquerade, Ronson set out to find, identify and
shame the perpetrators.

He
discovered that they weren’t people with grudges or internet shut-ins, but academics.
They claimed that the doppelganger Twitter ID wasn’t an idle mickey-take of a
public figure but in fact some form of sociological/philosophical experiment. Ronson
confronted these people and lambasted them in public, voicing his anger at
their jaw-droppingly juvenile stance and clear indifference to Ronson’s
feelings.

How
would anyone feel about such things? There’s no doubt Ronson felt vindictive –
stuffed with righteous fury. There’s a time to shrug things off, and there’s a
time to bring out what we call in Glasgow The Good Shoe. Isn’t there?

After
witnessing the backlash these lecturers received, at his instigation, Ronson
comes to realise that publicly shaming people can have far-reaching
consequences which might outstrip that of the initial “wrong” many times over.
Ronson takes what I would hesitatingly call a Christian outlook. Does anyone
deserve to be publicly shamed? What is it that drives Twitter shamers to tear
people apart in mobs – or worse, to stand on the edge of the circle and smack
their lips at the executioners’ handiwork?

Ronson
looks at some well-known recent cases of public shaming. The first of which
concerned the neuroscientist and author Jonah Lehrer. A journalist read a quote
in one of Lehrer’s books, supposedly from Bob Dylan. The reporter was a Dylan
fan, and the quote – which appeared in the book Imagine – sounded “phoney” to him. “When the hell did Dylan say
that?” Suspicion began to grow. The journalist, Michael C Moynihan, after a lot
of digging and some suspicious prevarication from Lehrer, eventually found out
that the author had fabricated the quote.

A
promising career came crashing down as Lehrer’s work went under the microscope,
with several additional journalistic malfeasances unveiled in brutal fashion. Nothing
in Lehrer’s background served notice that he was a fool, and certainly he’d
been no slouch academically. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, reserved
for the brightest of the bright – but Ronson isn’t so much interested in why
Lehrer did what he did, so much as what he went through as a result. Ronson
interviews Lehrer several times, gaining a harrowing insight into how his life
was torn to shreds. This leads to Lehrer making a speech at a high-profile
event, ostensibly to apologise, which was broadcast live on the internet.

Ronson
captures a moment of farce that wouldn’t disgrace one of the great sitcoms.
Lehrer delivered his mea culpa before
a digital backdrop showing live tweets to the event. So the speaker as well as
the audience could see, in real-time, people’s reactions to his shame
splattered across giant screens, in letters bigger than he is.

Some
of these tweets were sympathetic, if not exactly supportive. But the vast
majority were not.

Ronson
also looks at the case of Justine Sacco, a young PR executive who was shamed to
the four winds in a case you will certainly have heard of. In a dream job
travelling the world, Justine made an off-colour Twitter joke about the
incidence of Aids among black people across Africa. Justine’s comment was widely
retweeted, with predictable cultural commentary attached, across the world.
Hundreds of thousands of people called for her head on a plate… and much, much
more besides. The witch hunt took a matter of minutes to gain international momentum.

What
made this case particularly horrific was that the whole thing unfurled quicker
than wildfire, hotter than hell, while she was in the air. Sacco was flying
back to the US, oblivious that her reputation was headed for the gutter based
on a joke she sent while she took her seat on the plane. Bear in mind that it
was only a joke – poorly judged and in bad taste, but certainly not knocking
black people or Aids victims. It had a satirical point to make about white
privilege, which seemed to fly over the heads of most of the shrieking,
frothing ragers who bullwhipped her to the top of global trending topics. The
numbers involved are mind-boggling; the online world knew who she was almost
instantly. This all unfolded before she’d even touched down, opened her phone…
and Saw. Journalists were waiting for her at the arrivals gate.

It’s
difficult to comprehend what a nightmare this must have been. Who had she hurt,
really? Who was even offended?

Then
there was Lindsey Stone, a care worker who appeared to be making crude gestures
in a photograph taken outside Arlington Cemetery. Middle fingers, the flag, war
dead, the military, and a young woman in the fullest bloom of life, laughing
and enjoying herself… my god, she came pre-packaged for every right-wing
lunkhead in white America to tear open with their teeth. And they did.

No
matter that it was largely down to her not having her privacy settings
correctly calibrated on Facebook; no matter that, again, there was a running
joke attached, where Lindsay and a friend had a habit of taking pictures of
themselves disobeying signs to “show respect”, “no smoking”, “no ball games”,
etc.

Stone
and Sacco’s lives were ruined as a result of silly light-hearted remarks which
were picked up, misinterpreted, dipped in sh*t and smeared all over the
internet. They both lost their jobs; they say they can’t even go dating,
because their potential dates will be able to look them up on Google. Their
lives will never be the same.

Ronson
theorises that people are motivated to publicly shame because they thought they
were doing something good. An underlying sense of morality was tweaked, and
perhaps perverted. He examines analogue shamings of the past, such as the
stocks, and concludes that they were banned because authorities realised they
simply weren’t very effective in big cities. Why we might want to shame is
examined, with a refreshingly critical look at one of the great psychological
studies, the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ronson seems to suggest that the guard
who went particularly off the rails in the landmark study thought he was
fulfilling a role and proving the hypothesis, rather than turning into a
monster when handed a uniform and a big stick. That he was doing good, in other
words.

Ronson
also looks at those who survive shame, such as the ex-Formula One boss Max Mosley,
whose kinky sex life was exposed in harrowing detail by a British tabloid 10
years ago. Mosley won unprecedented damages over the case, but even more impressive,
to Ronson’s eyes, is Mosley’s recovery from his shaming. It hasn’t stuck to
him. He simply refuses to accept his lot: he refuses to be humiliated. I am
unashamed, Mosley says. He even strikes back, getting righteous about his right
to a private life, and his grim, implacable campaign in the courts.

Ronson
examines services which seek to remove shame from the one public record which
seems to matter these days – Google – and then looks at the ways in which
people can be rescued from shame in less technological ways. There’s one
anecdote by a leading US psychiatrist about a murderer in his care which
chilled me. He began to kill people in his life as a pimp because shame
instilled in him at a young age had stripped him of his humanity. Beatings and
sexual abuse left him dead inside – numb. A robot. Not a person. Violence was
the only way for him to cope, or even to function, in a world which had decided
he wasn’t worth bothering about.

You
don’t have to go far to find examples of public shamings. Somebody is being
shamed as we speak. Hey, it might even be you. The example that really struck
home with me was the two guys at a tech conference who shared smutty jokes with
each other about “big dongles” and what have you. They were amusing each other
– not the world’s most mature jokes, but so what? It wasn’t for public
broadcast.

Except
that it was. A woman sitting behind them overheard them, tweeted what they’d
been saying, took a photo of them, then posted it on Twitter – to catastrophic
effect. Again, both men ended up losing their jobs after a worldwide internet sh*tstorm.
One of them had a wife and a baby daughter. They’d done nothing wrong. I had
little sympathy for the smug-sounding woman who did the shaming, and found
myself wishing for her to suffer a backlash in kind.

She
got it, from 4chan users. Once these and other online attacks on people by
4chan were spelled out, I felt queasy at my own motives in wanting the initial
shamer to be… punished.

Punishment
is what it’s all about. And our anger. Sitting there, at our computers,
hammering at the keys, our fingers tap-dancing across the touchscreens. Offended
by a world which we cannot control by deleting, resizing or reformatting.

Imagine
some nightmare future where your brain is synched with an interface of some
kind, without even a gap between a thought in your head and its expression on
the internet, or whatever will follow the internet. Jesus!

I’ve
indulged in public shaming on Booksquawk. The one I grew so ashamed about that
I asked our editor to delete it was about a football player whose chief
misfortune, really, was to have played for a team I dislike. But he was also guilty
of a transgression which saw him scapegoated for a while in the national press
and shamed six ways to Shanghai. I feasted on this event, the worst moment of
someone’s life, more than 30 years after it happened.

Then
I read an article about the guy. He wasn’t from an era when footballers got
rich, or anything like it. Sure, he had some medals on the mantelpiece but only
he knows what their true worth is. He maybe bought a pub or something once he
retired from football. I thought: this guy has been whipped around the public
square thanks to a mistake he made – possibly even in good faith – decades ago.
He’s had enough. Why don’t you take the sh*t-faced comments out and leave the
guy alone? So I did.

I
like to think I knew what Jon Ronson experienced when he got the flame-thrower
out on the dipsticks who mimicked him on social media. A shame all of its own.
The shame of kicking people when they are down.

This
was years ago. But there are more recent shamings carried out on big, obvious,
and easy targets. You won’t have to click back too far to find my opinions on
phone-hacking by the media, or on the ultimate British bogeyman, the late Jimmy
Savile. Now, there’s hardly anyone in their right mind who would defend these
people - in particular Savile, whose wickedness will reverberate for
generations. A lot of them deserve all they get (or didn’t get, in Savile’s
case). What Jon Ronson’s book did was to make me examine my conscience, and
look at my own motivations for leathering these people, no matter how much they
deserved it.

What
kick did I get from acting all self-righteous? What purpose did it prove in
parading these transgressors’ heads around in public? Was I telling people
things they didn’t already know? Was I pleased with myself on some level? Did I
feel noble? Did I think I’d done something good?

As
I remarked earlier, Ronson has a pseudo-Christian outlook: no-one really
deserves shame and humiliation, no matter what they’ve done. And even if they
do, who are you to shame anyone? Let the shamers look to themselves before they
unload on people who, in some cases, haven’t actually done anything wrong. Or,
as another guy put it a long time ago, let he who is without sin cast the first
stone. Looking beyond Bible Cringe, it’s not bad advice, all told. I felt suitably
chastened, upon reading this book. It’s better to leave these mob events well
alone.

Ronson
misses out on the anthropological aspect of his analysis; that it’s mob
behaviour, deciding what social norms are and enforcing them, brutally, on a
global level. This idea reminded me of a study I once read about guys on
building sites who make sexist remarks to passing women. There was a clear
pecking order among the men, with much of the unpleasant remarks made by the
younger members of the group, tailing off the older the men got. The study
concluded that the reason for this was that the younger men were trying to gain
entry to the group, and also to show social alignment with the elders. It’s
horrid to think of ourselves as pack animals, but we are. Ronson seeks to
debunk historical studies on “the mob” and apparent loss of control during mob
behaviour. But there’s no denying a flocking instinct is at play in many public
shamings.

Technology
is the line driven right through the centre of all this. I wonder if this shame-based
digital consensus will lead to a new kind of puritanism? Certainly I tire of
all the hand-wringing and sanctimony on Facebook and elsewhere, even when it
comes to seemingly worthy causes. When it comes to Justine Sacco and Lindsey
Stone, I can sometimes see where I might have been these poor people, on the
turn of a card, on a bad day.

Off-colour
jokes? I think I’ve made enough of them on this site to get run out of town. I
often talk about how my friends and I should have a killswitch on our email
chat just in case we get hacked – or if one of us dies suddenly, sparing our
partners the full horror of discovering What
Men Banter About Without Women.

I’m
not sure I’m even joking. Some of the poor bastards in this book could easily
be me if the wrong button is pressed.

What
about criminals who seem more deserving of public shaming? Ronson interviews a
Maximum Bob-style US judge who punishes criminals by making them carry signs
and billboards revealing their crimes to passers-by. One thief was made to
shame himself in front of the store he took items from, every day, for months.

Then
we hear that the punishment worked. The criminal himself saw it as a form of
redemption. Crime rates around about the store where the shaming happened fell
significantly.

The
ghastly question arises: Does society need shame?

There
are laugh-out-loud encounters, first of all when Ronson attends a “have no
shame” therapy session where people are invited to say what they feel without
hiding it. This descends into a multi-player flaming session where people say
how much they hate Ronson, leading to him losing his temper and revealing how
much he hates them in return.

Ronson
also interviews people working in the porn industry who make a living out of being
publicly shamed and degraded. I “read” this book in its audio format, and I
understood shame of a different sort when Ronson described the action in a porn
shoot just as I opened the car window to flash my pass at the office car park
sensor, while a couple of colleagues walked past the open window.

You
may have gathered from the many reheated reviews I’ve put up of late that I
don’t get as much reading done these days. Audiobooks played in the car are a
godsend in this regard – I wish I’d moved over to this format two years ago. So
now I partly “read” while I’m driving during my long commute. Ronson himself narrates
the audiobook, and you certainly get a little more nuance in the spoken version
than you would on the page.

The
book left me counting my lucky stars that I’ve never been publicly shamed, and
offering up a prayer or two to Google algorithms that I never will be.